Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  He came up the gallery slowly but purposefully; he was not merely lingering about the Queen, as all those other shadows. He had come for a definite purpose; to do something, or speak with someone. A very stately figure, in sombre magnificence of dark velvet, he passed close to Bess; so close that she caught the faint smell of the dried orange he carried in his hand, and it seemed to her that the candle flames burned bluish at his passing.

  She shivered uncontrollably, and felt Mary Herbert’s small warm hand over hers, and heard the other woman’s voice in her ear, asking what ailed her.

  ‘I feel as though death himself had just walked by,’ she said.

  ‘It was only My Lord Henry Howard.’ The other soothed her.

  ‘I know. I am a fool. It is this long waiting.’ She strained her eyes after the dark receding figure, and it seemed to her that as it melted into the gloom of the stairhead, it was joined by another shadow, which there was no mistaking, that of the Secretary of State.

  She could not know, save by that intuitive sense of death as he passed, that scarcely an hour before, Henry Howard had been writing the latest of many poisonous letters to James of Scotland, in a peculiarly ingenious cypher of his own.

  He had devised that cypher some years previously, when he and Cecil had begun their correspondence with James; for they had things to write which were better not read by other eyes than those for which they were intended. That had been when men’s minds first began to be occupied with the question of the Queen’s successor, and it had seemed to these particular two men advisable that they should forge a close link with the most likely heir. They were an odd partnership, having nothing of their aims in common save a determination to be the new King’s Chief Councillor when the time came. Cecil desired above all to effect the change of ruler smoothly, to set James firmly on his throne before rival claimants could make trouble, and himself to be to the new ruler what he had been to the old one. His goal was clear before him, and he paved the way towards it, for the country’s good as well as his own, with a cold uncaring for broken lives and personal tragedies by the way. Howard on the other hand, had forged his link with James in order to gain his favour for Catholicism, and, hating Ralegh as the arch-enemy of Spain and the Romish church, his letters were full of subtle attacks on the Queen’s Captain. For years he had been preparing, by sneers and insinuations, lies and twisted half-truths, for Ralegh’s downfall in the day when James and not Elizabeth should rule England.

  And now the day was here. Between three and four in the morning a door banged somewhere, and a gust of wind bellied out the arras in the Privy Gallery: and in the bedchamber before whose door her Captain stood guard, the Queen died.

  A few minutes later, in a lull of the moaning wind, Bess caught the sound of horses’ hooves trippling into the distance, and guessed that a messenger was riding North already, with news for the Scottish King. She was right. He had been standing by, his horse ready saddled, for several hours. Cecil had had the letter written in advance.

  The Queen lay dead, the Coronation ring cut from her swollen finger; but a ring that Essex had given her was still on her hand.

  PART TWO - JAMES

  Chapter 13 - A Mesh of Many Strands

  JAMES had come to the English throne. Not his kinswoman Arabella Stuart; not Lord Hartford; not the Infanta of Spain. All that, it seemed, was over and done with, the plotting and whispering and intriguing that had darkened the last years of Elizabeth’s reign swept away like cobwebs, and the house made clean and shining for its new Master. James rode south in the first flush of spring, and many of the younger folk watched for his coming eagerly, saying to each other that they had been ruled by a woman long enough; looking to good days ahead.

  But to Ralegh, the good days were already behind. Almost the first thing James had done on reaching London was to relieve him of his Captaincy of the Guard, and forbid him the Court. Sherborne received him into exile again. And then, most unexpectedly, at the end of May, word came that he was free to attend at Court once more, and he went instantly with Cecil’s letter in his hand to look for Bess, just as he had gone to her with the Lord Admiral’s letter, six years ago. This time he found her in her painted parlour, copying the receipt for a sure remedy against the colic into the book in which she kept such things; and taking her by surprise, plucked the quill from her hand, spattering ink on the careful page.

  ‘Oh Walter, see what you have done!’

  He laughed, completely unrepentant. ‘Never mind for that. Listen to me, Bess. I am free to attend at Whitehall again!’

  Bess got up slowly, the tragedy of the marred page forgotten. ‘But you will not go, Walter? Surely you will not go?’ she said.

  ‘Of course I shall go. Why should I not?’

  She answered his question with another. ‘Does the King return to you the Captaincy of the Guard?’

  A shadow seemed to darken the blazing blue of her husband’s eyes. ‘No, not that.’

  ‘Or Durham House?’

  The shadow was gone. ‘Madam unreason! Have you not always hated Durham House? The Bishop is welcome to what is left of it!’

  Bess put out a hand and touched his slashed sleeve. ‘Walter, the King hates you — he made that clear enough when he found you among those who met him at Burghley House. He hates you because he has been taught to; he has been taught that you are his enemy, that you wrought Essex’s downfall, who was his ally.’

  ‘Sweet, who should teach him these things?’

  ‘I — do not know,’ Bess said slowly. ‘But Henry Howard has small love for you, and he has the King’s ear. You know that all men say he and Cecil are the two wheels of James’ triumphal chariot.’

  ‘Howard, possibly.’ He sounded a little impatient, for he was disappointed at the way she had taken his news. ‘A venomous creature. But you are not bidding me to distrust Cecil, are you?’

  ‘I am not sure. He has changed since his Bess died —God forbid that we should mistrust a friend. But Walter, please, please do not go back to Court.’

  ‘God’s sweet life, Bess!’ He was more than impatient now, he was exasperated, and he refused the hand she held out to him. ‘Cannot you see that those same reasons you have been putting forward against my return are the very reasons why I must go back to Court? If anyone is indeed poisoning the King’s mind against me, am I to sit here with my hands folden across my paunch, and let them do as they will with my name? You should be ashamed to counsel it.’

  ‘And you?’ she flashed out at him. ‘Should you not be ashamed to go crawling back to lick the hand of a fat King who has had you whipped? A King who dribbles in his beard and ends his dinner too drunk to stand; whose Court is already a byword from which many people prefer to stay away? You, who have been the Queen’s Captain?’

  ‘I who have been the Queen’s Captain,’ he said harshly. ‘There is no need that you should remind me. May I in turn remind you that James is the King, named as her successor by Elizabeth herself — and without his favour I am hamstrung as I was without hers. Bess, cannot you understand?’

  Impatience and exasperation were gone as swiftly as they had come, and the last words were an appeal.

  Against her will, Bess did understand. It was for his dream, the old, all-demanding dream, that he needed the King’s favour. He had his own integrity, but for him, integrity lay in keeping faith with his dream. She sighed. ‘When do we start?’

  ‘I shall start early in the morning, but you must stay here with the boy. You said yourself that the Court was a byword, and I will not have you smeared by it, nor snubbed again by the silly lint-haired Queen, as you were at Burghley House!’

  So the next morning he set out for Westminster, and Bess stood with Little Watt beside her, in the house doorway, to see him ride away. It was a golden morning, fresh with the youth of spring, warming to the fulfilment of summer; from the distant woods Jerusalem way, a cuckoo was calling, and Little Watt flung up his head and called back joyously ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ Ralegh r
eined in at the turn of the bridle path, under the lime trees in young leaf, and looked back. Always, when he rode out alone, he turned there for a last sight of Bess standing in the doorway of the home he loved. He doffed his hat in farewell, and Bess put up her hand as she had done so often before, and waved to him. But today he seemed to linger a little over his leave-taking, looking back again, as though he had in that moment some instinct that it was for the last time.

  But if he had had any such foreboding, it passed as quickly as the shadow of a flying bird. He was free to attend on the new King, and from that, who knew what glorious fortune might follow? If he could gain the King’s ear, maybe he would yet see an English Empire of his building, in the New World.

  *

  A few days after the Coronation, Ralegh was waiting on the North Terrace at Windsor, to accompany the King out hunting. The King was late — the King was generally late; so many things always went amiss to delay him. At thirty-nine he was already a messy old man. He shambled both in speech and gait, he could not eat without spilling his food, he could not sleep without snoring and dribbling in his beard, nor drink without becoming humiliatingly drunk. It was his misfortune. Ralegh, leaning against the balustrade and puffing at his silver-bowled pipe, wondered with casual contempt, what it was this time.

  All along the Terrace, gay groups drifted and mingled; the Court waiting for the King. Ralegh’s eye sauntered over them, singling out here one, there another. Francis Bacon of the bright hazel eye that always reminded him of a viper’s; Tom Howard; Penelope Rich, who had once been Penelope Devereux, like a leopard lily in the sunlight, making pretty play with her gloves for the benefit of Mary Herbert’s younger son. Anything that was breeched, it seemed, was old enough for Lady Rich to flirt with. She flirted as a flower gives out scent. Ralegh’s gaze lingered on the boy beside her; no trace of his Uncle and namesake in him, indeed the high favour in which he was held by the slobbering King was a measure of the difference between him and Philip Sidney; yet when he turned his head — so, it was odd how the other Philip came back.

  A few more familiar figures met his wandering gaze; for the rest, a swarm of hungry Scottish Courtiers who had followed the King south. That ruddy and impudent page of his, for instance, Robert Carr, kicking his eels yonder ...

  Ralegh’s eyes fell on a small boy with a guinea-gold head, squatting on his haunches close by to play with a Spaniel pup; and his face momentarily lost its look of bleak distaste. There was one good thing come south with Daft Jamey, anyway; little Prince Henry; nine years old — the same age as Watt. The boy looked up and caught his eye, and the eager pointed face quirked into a faun’s smile. He held the puppy up, its pink stomach exposed, its hind legs trailing, as though to share his delight in it with the dark man with the pearl in his ear. Then a group of girls came between them, and Ralegh turned from the crowded terrace to watch the horses and leashed hounds being walked to and fro below; to look out over twenty miles of softly rolling woods and water meadows. Summer was fulfilled and falling like a ripe peach into the hand; shining gossamer on the early morning grass, flecks of gold and lemon here and there among the weary green of elms and poplars, and the broken-voiced cuckoo at point of departure. The distances were very blue, deeply blue as the flowers of the bittersweet. It would be good at Sherborne now.

  Standing in bleak isolation among the shifting, chattering, many-coloured throng. he heard a light, curiously prowling footfall behind him, and turned to find Robert Cecil at his elbow. The subtle face of the Secretary of State was shuttered, nothing visible for good or ill, of the thoughts, the emotions behind it. ‘Sir Walter, I come as from His Majesty the King,’ he said. ‘I grieve to spoil your hunting; but your presence is required in the Council Chamber, to answer certain questions of the Lords of the Council.’

  And a few days later, after answering many questions of the Lords of the Council, Ralegh was in the Tower, awaiting trial on a charge of treason.

  *

  To poor Bess, hurrying through the grim ways of the Tower where she had spent her solitary honeymoon, knowing nothing save the bald statement of the message that had brought her post-haste from Sherborne, it seemed that she had stumbled into a nightmare and could not find the way out. To get to Ralegh was the only clear thought in the utter chaos of her mind, and she clung to it. It was thanks to Robert Cecil that she was to be allowed that. Robin had been a true friend in gaining her the King’s leave to be with her husband; he was their friend still; he would help them; he must. And yet at thought of him she was gripped by the formless fear that is the essence of nightmare — the face of a friend changing into evil, the potential horror behind familiar things.

  She followed blindly, where the warder led, not conscious of steps and doors and crooked ways, until she came down a last flight, and found that she was in a dark and narrow place, and beside her a door was opening. As she turned to it, someone came out past the turnkey who stood there. A short, burly man. In that dim place it was an instant before she recognised him as Dr. Peter Turner, who had often attended the family when they had need of greater skill than she herself possessed, and an instant longer before the implication of his presence struck home to her.

  ‘Dr. Turner, is my husband ill?’

  Gesturing to the turnkey to close the door, the Doctor turned to her with the gruff gentleness that his patients knew. ‘Lady Ralegh, it is by God’s mercy that you come so soon. It is best that you know the truth before you go in to him. Sir Walter has tried to kill himself.’

  She gave a little gasp, and all the blood in her body seemed to leap back to her heart. ‘Oh no!’ she whispered. ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ as though by the repetition she could make what he said untrue. But it was true, she could read it in the physician’s face. ‘Is he —’ she began, and could not finish the sentence.

  ‘No no, he will do well enough with you beside him.’ Dr. Turner was giving her arm little clumsy reassuring pats. ‘It is but a flesh wound — here under the breast — and will soon mend. He has suffered very greatly.’

  Bess had no need that he should tell her that. Knowing Ralegh as she did, she knew all too well how bitter, how absolute and unbearable must have been the despair in which he made such an admission of defeat. ‘Let me in to him now, Dr. Turner,’ she said.

  ‘Aye, poor lass,’ said the Doctor, returning unconsciously to the broad North-country speech of his boyhood. He stepped aside, and the turnkey re-opened the door.

  As it closed again behind her, Bess walked forward into a small room walled with undressed stone, into an airless and faintly animal atmosphere tangible as smoke. The light from a tiny window — hardly more than a chink — high under the groined roof showed her the Queen’s Captain stretched on a narrow plank bed against the oozing wall. He was lying flat, his head turned from her; the dirty covering was pushed down, and where his shirt lay open at the breast, showed the white gleam of bandages. Part of her mind registered the fact that there was no stain on his shirt; somebody must have brought him clean linen. She was across the dim place, and kneeling beside him.

  ‘Walter — I am here.’

  For a long time he remained rigidly unresponsive, with averted face. Then he turned his head and looked at her, with a frown between eyes that were at once bitter and bright. ‘So you see, I have botched it,’ he said, with a jibing note in his voice that hurt her as though it had been a blow. ‘All my life I have botched all that I set my hand to, but I had supposed I might at least have handled so simple a matter as this without bungling.’

  ‘Thank God you did bungle!’ Bess said. ‘Oh, thank God you did, my dear.’

  He moved his head restlessly. ‘It would have been better for you and the boy — better for my own name on men’s lips, that I died uncondemned.’

  ‘They will acquit you,’ she protested, with the terror jumping in her voice. ‘They must! You have touched no treason!’

  ‘Nevertheless, they will not acquit me. Do you not see? My trial will be a form, a mummer’s
play to satisfy the Mob that their new King deals in justice, even by their enemy and his. I am finished, Bess.’

  ‘No!’

  He put up a fumbling hand to caress her shoulder, the bitterness falling from him. ‘Poor Bess; my poor little Bess. Do not you hope; the outcome will but strike the sharper ...’ He lay for a silent moment, his eyes on her face. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he began to speak, quickly and urgently. ‘Listen now, for there is no saying how short a time we may have, nor when we may speak together again, and it is best that you understand the whole. Soon after I returned to Court, Cobham dropped something in my ear concerning a crazy plot with Arenburg for tipping James off the throne and setting Arabella Stuart in his place, with Spanish gold to keep her there, and Spanish gold for Cobham and Spanish gold for me if I would lend them my aid. Knowing Cobham, I thought it merest vapouring — fool that I was — and paid no heed. But a plot there was, Bess, and just before the Coronation, Cecil gathered it in, and with it another in which that idiot brother of Cobham’s, George Brooke, was embroiled, which seems to have been for keeping James on the throne but making him dance to the Pope’s tune. When Brooke was examined, it seems he stated that he and his fellows had thought me a fit man to be of the action — though God in his Heaven knows why, for I am scarce a lover of the Romish Church. That, and the long association there has been between myself and Cobham, has been enough to drag me into the meshes.’

  Bess’s brain seemed racing round like a frantic caged squirrel. ‘But Lord Cobham must be linked to a score of innocent men as closely as to you; and it is no crime of yours, that George Brooke has had a thought concerning you! Walter, they cannot bring you to trial on such grounds!’